Post by Laurance on Sept 15, 2010 9:45:33 GMT 1
According to media sources, the Channel 4 soap opera Hollyoaks has a daring plot under development for the late summer. Allegedly, one of the cast is to have an ongoing relationship after meeting an alien (called Kevin!) and the audience must guess whether ‘he’ really is from another planet… or just Manchester. The soap’s viewing figures have been falling like space junk recently, and you might be forgiven for agreeing that this concept might be a step too far even in this fictional Chester suburb. However, the cast member involved is a UFO buff, so perhaps ‘real’ ufology is the inspiration. I thought I’d pull a few cases concerning alien visitors out of my files to see how close to reality Hollyoaks gets.
THE GARDEN VISITOR
At one end of the scale is this case told by Susan (I’ve used pseudonyms throughout, for obvious reasons).
Susan lived in an isolated village near Lymm, Cheshire, and described how one night in spring 1978 a figure appeared in the back garden beside a tree. It was no ordinary prowler – the entity glowed silver and, despite the brilliance, cast no shadow.
The next night, the figure returned, approaching from open fields at the rear, coming right up to the French windows and staring in. Susan and her terrified family looked on as the powerful glow lit up the room and two bright eyes gazed at them. Curiously, as on the first night, their fierce German shepherd (Alsatian), trained to bark at intruders, remained silent throughout.
Susan’s husband bravely ran into the garden to confront the alien intruder, but there was no sign of the figure. However, a splashing noise suggested that something had fallen into the swimming pool the family were having constructed.
Curiously, on reaching the pool there was nobody there and the figure never returned.
PROTO-ASTRONAUTS
In the above case, any links to UFOs are constructed through inference rather than evidence (a common theme). But alien-like behaviour is more apparent in what happened to Elsie, an elderly lady who lived near Halifax, during World War II amidst blackout regulations.
Elsie was very ill with severe jaundice and confined to bed when suddenly, in the sky outside her window, a huge electric blue sphere appeared, out of which emerged three figures. They were only about 1.5m tall but dressed in silver overalls with what she called “goldfish bowls” on their heads.
These entities floated to the foot of her bed, illuminated only by the dim embers of a coal fire. Elsie said that the oddest thing was the incredible silence that descended over the room: it was as if the Universe were holding its breath.
After busying themselves at her side, the beings floated through the bedroom wall. As they disappeared, so did the blue glow.
Elsie, who had felt curiously elated, always considered this a real experience, although others thought it more likely a hallucination, perhaps linked to her illness. However, the next day her family and the doctor were amazed to find that the jaundice had disappeared, something she ascribed to her strange nocturnal visitors.
Elsie had no knowledge of ‘aliens’ in 1942, but, years later, when seeing the first pictures of astronauts, she was stunned to see the same ‘goldfish bowls’ she had witnessed.
CONTACT
Elsie’s alien contact was a fleeting one, but in other instances this relationship with ET is lifelong. It can result in a real dilemma for UFO research: whether to investigate (and so affirm) or to help treat (and seek to dissolve) an experience that has become deeply rooted.
Georgina, from South Wales, came to me with such a problem. Her encounters spanned five decades since her childhood in the 1950s. The early episodes involved “strange people who entered and passed through my bedroom or stood there just watching me in the night”. Often she would find herself inexplicably outside, staring into the sky with a puzzling sense of longing. She also awoke in bed with a heavy pressure on her chest and a voice talking to her – typical of ‘sleep paralysis’, common as we emerge from deep sleep, often accompanied by auditory hallucinations and the cause of countless bedroom visitations misinterpreted as assault by anything from demons to aliens, dependent on the culture.
Some will dismiss such incidents as vivid imagination or assume that they have psychic powers or the ability to ‘see spirits’. Or, of course, they can interpret these things as alien contact.
In this case, Georgina’s story took a slightly different path. Several ‘time lapses’ during early adolescence saw her awaken in strange places, unaware of how she’d got there. Doctors diagnosed temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE). The electroshock therapy they prescribed left her with severe migraines and feeling worse than ever, until she persuaded the doctor she was ‘better’ and attempted to integrate her alien contacts into her normal life as part of who she was.
Through the 1970s, 80s and 90s Georgina struggled to decide whether she was a medium or a contactee, and (after seeing such things on TV) even whether her time lapses masked unremembered alien abduction. Some of her encounters were clearly UFO-like. For instance, working at a holiday camp in Sussex, she would wake with huge disorientation, feeling “unreal” and “having been somewhere else”. In one such instance, she saw a gigantic craft hovering just above the beach, and claims a fellow camp worker confirmed that she had seen it too. On another occasion, back in Wales, she saw a huge Moon-like object over the mountain (with the real Moon elsewhere in the sky). This was accompanied by sensations of floating and mental images apparently sent by the benevolent beings behind her experiences.
OUT-OF-BODY CONTACT
Barbara was staying at an idyllic cottage near Blairdrummond in Scotland when she saw her UFO. It was nothing dramatic, just a light crossing the sky at speed. To the seasoned investigator, this sounds like a meteor, but to Barbara the aftermath of her innocuous sighting was life-changing. She started to have out-of-body experiences during which she believed she had regular sojourns with ‘aliens’. These involved ‘trips’ to other realms and culminated in one where she awoke bolt upright, yet out of her body, watching a UFO over her garden. It was surrounded by flashing orange lights, and, Barbara added coolly, her then house sat beside the UFO window of Rendlesham Forest in Suffolk.
As this contact continued, Barbara was enticed into the UFO by an alien who appeared next to her sleeping husband. It was small in stature but basically humanoid and benevolent – though telepathically urging that she go with it for a visit, which she did (still out-of-body) and had further experiences too fuzzy to recall.
Barbara was left with long-term trauma – notably a fear of going to sleep. Medication only made things worse, and then her young son began to claim he was seeing a ‘man’ in his bedroom that nobody else could see. Understandably, her fears intensified.
How to advise on such a series of events is a worrying issue for the UFO community. Do you ‘regress’ the witness and dig up memories (or fantasies) of missing recall? Do you encourage the witness’s hopes that these visitors are benign and play down the negative connotations of alien abduction? Do you advise medical help?
UFO research has not found the answer. Indeed, nobody really understands the true nature of these long-term experiences. Interpretation is often down to individual presupposition by a witness (have they read books about aliens, for instance?) and it can be easily swayed by small events, such as seeing something they think is a UFO.
ANGELS AND ALIENS
Compare the above case with this next one reported to me by a woman from a small seaside community in Western Australia.
Pat was ‘spiritually attuned’; aware of guardian angels, she felt a sense of awareness prior to a visit. She is also the only witness I have come across to create an astrological chart of the moment she underwent her alien contact.
On the morning in question (around 6am), she ‘came to’ – definitely awake (“It was real!” she insisted) – in the bathroom. She observed, via the mirror, two figures wandering around the house communicating telepathically. They were discussing in a matter-of-fact way what seemed to be the night’s experiments, saying things like “I’ll just go and check on the other one”. This, Pat assumed to be her sleeping husband.
Pat spoke to the beings and they told her that she was progressing nicely but shouldn’t “get mixed up in any hanky panky”. Their attitude was casual, and indeed they soon ignored her and wandered off, discussing their next assignment. She even asked them to be quiet in case they woke her husband; the entities looked at her, but continued talking and left. Moments later, she was back in bed.
So, a particularly vivid dream, you might suspect, but Pat insists not. And why interpret these beings not as angels or guides but aliens? Well, it was their appearance: they were tall, humanoid, with high foreheads and blond hair, and both wore skin-tight blue ski suits, as described by other abductees.
CLUES AND CAUSES
So we now have some interesting clues. Firstly, that some alien witnesses have a spiritual outlook on life, interpreting ambiguous phenomena in UFO terms only if they are familiar with the subject. Indeed, both of these events could be seen as out-of-body experiences rather than alien contacts. It is common in alien contacts that the inner reality of what happens is more evident than the external physical reality, and you shouldn’t assume you would see what the witness saw if you chanced to be where they were at the right moment. But, equally, you’d be foolish to dismiss such experiences as ‘just’ imagination.
We can explore the experiences of ongoing alien contacts in several ways – as physical causes, psychological triggers, metaphysical solutions and, of course, via cosmic or alien interpretations. For now, it’s worth looking at how medical conditions might have a part to play. Last issue, we saw that one witness was diagnosed (rightly or wrongly) as having temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) and this suggestion has been mooted by doctors several times when studying contactees. While major TLE usually includes symptoms – such as seizures – which are hard to miss over time, there are lower-level ones – sensations of something touching or moving over the skin, auditory hallucinations and feelings of either euphoria or intense sadness. All these are common in alien contact cases.
More widespread in the general populace are migraine attacks, and there are interesting connections between epilepsy and migraine – for instance certain epilepsy medications can help some migraine sufferers. Sufferers describe visual and auditory hallucinations, raised or dulled senses, a tingling on the body and the loss of coordination sometimes reported after a severe attack. All are again recurrent features of alien contact, perhaps suggesting further connections.
Another possibly significant fact is that migraine attacks are several times more common in women than men, and alien contacts are also much more commonly reported by females – against the trend for UFO sightings in general. Moreover, many alien contactees describe having unexpected migraine attacks before, during and after an encounter.
Curiously, there is a third syndrome that is far less widely diagnosed. Indeed, I only discovered that it existed because my doctor diagnosed me as suffering from it two years ago and, like many others, it seems, I have had it for years without knowing. This is VVS (vasovagal syncope) and it involves a sudden stimulation of the vagus nerve. This can happen as a one-off event, through a trigger such as stress, or can be recurrent through less understood medical factors.
I have been collating experiences from fellow VVS sufferers and am seeing fascinating links with migraine and epilepsy as well as a startling number of symptoms reported during alien contact cases, from apparent time lapses and images of tubes and tunnels. I’ll return to this subject another time, but by looking for physical triggers we can at least take the first step toward finding some answers.
Source:- www.forteantimes.com/strangedays/ufofiles/4087/life_with_the_aliens.html